Education District Quadrangle

Chicago, Illinois

Asked for a design that would unify / identify Chicago's South Loop Education District with its 50,000 students and faculty, we abstracted Chicago's omnipresent grid in a hovering net, suspended as a silvery, reticulated plane that bounds / integrates / animates the city's densest concentration of institutions of higher learning.  The net intensifies the urban academic paradigm, transforming city streets into a campus where the city itself is the heart of the curriculum.  It works at city and pedestrian scales, from the streets below and the towers above, in Wabash's narrow canyon and the South Loop's sprawl of low buildings and parking lots, all day and all night, to define the Education District.  By day, its strands define spaces, filter views and etch a shimmering screen across both sky and skyscrapers, casting a delicate tracery of shadows on the streets below.  At night, its arrays of multicolored, ever changing LEDs are pixels in a city-sized video screen.  The net is a Chicago-scale place-maker, connecting / meshing / wiring the Education District with gleaming-in-the-sunshine / pulsing-with-energy urban land art.

Recognition

Chicago Tribune, 12.15.05

Visionary Chicago Architecture: Fourteen Inspired Concepts for the Third Millenia, S Tigerman & W Martin (Chicago: Chicago Central Area Committee, 2004)

Project Data

Scope: visionary project for Chicago's Education District in Visionary Architecture: Fourteen Inspired Concepts for the Third Millennia (Chicago: CCAC, 2004)

Project Team: David Woodhouse, Evan Fox, David Goodman, Micheal McClimon, Andy Tinucci

Visualized Concepts (video)